As long as y'all are so generous - any advice on best blogging?

I restarted on Blogger/BlogSpot but have been told it's about the worst (very poor archives, linkage, etc)

Any better sites that don't cost? If no such a thing, I'd like to hear opinions of who/where/why is the best & most worth it.

I was able to teach myself HTML easily, but I have to admit I'm stumped on skins... does anyone have any resources for uh, 'easy' skins coding (if that's possible at all!)

I paid one person for a Red White & Blue Flag skin for Blogger but since she won't answer me now when I tried to contract her for more work... guess I'm not the *right* type of 'merican to use those colors
Pfft!

I greatly appreciate any advice

And Thank You in advance! :)

I used Blogger to create the template for my web site and I use them to create the postings. But I host the site on my own domain, so my blog is advertisement-free. It actually works very well. I like the Blogger template. I've got Blogger configured to upload the index.html file to my web server, and I simply cut and paste the post into the existing index.html. I use MS Frontpage for the basic HTML editing and I use the freeware version of WS_FTP to pull down the index.html file that Blogger creates.

It does get a lot of the kids, but I've also seen more "respectable" blogs there as well. I gather that it's entirely free now, and they offer a bunch of templates for the appearance, with options to adjust colors and other details.

I haven't used it myself and don't know how it stacks up against other services, but it seems pretty popular and fairly user-friendly.


On edit: This is all over my head, but there's are LiveJournal clients for Mozilla/Firefox called Livelizard (http://livelizard.mozdev.org/) and Deepest Sender (http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/) which apparently make the process easier.

it's free and great. I've been on there for about...oh, 4 years or so. Tried out lotsa other free journals, but they're crap (imo).

Try it out! Even with free accounts, you can make alot of modifications to the way your journal is laid out (style, font, colours, etc).

I'm sorry that I can't seem to directly write you or send a private message because I'm 'new', so pardon me that I have to use up bandwidth to ask a few more questions

Starroute & Heddi, thank you! I'm looking it over right now!

Scottcsmith - thank you also!
Nice site!
Now I was entertaining that idea myself (WAY back when I was optomistic that I could translate html fairly easily into blogging language ;) but upon looking at the coding for skins... OMG! what with the side bars, layout, etc.. I have NO idea exactly where to plug in certain pieces -- like for instance as you said, the configuration of Blogger to upload the index.html
Well, I have NO idea of where to plug anything in.
I'm not sure if you can read my email address; as with an ostrich with it's head in the sand -- if I can't see you, you can't see me! :> But in case you can't,
and of course IF you would care to help me a bit more,
please email me at mespiegel@hotmail.com and I'll return email from my home account.
I'm also wary about getting spammed by Anti-Democratic subversives. :(

Oh yes -- one more thing. I see the "Comments" and "Linkbacks" in others blogs but do not see where in Blogger they come from... or are they additional program(s) and then of course.... WHERE those get correctly 'plugged in' in the coding... *eek!*

I hope that was clear, I'm not sure of the terminology :/

Above all, THANK YOU ALL AGAIN! :^)

I use it, but would prefer not to reveal my Kos identity on DU. It's really easy to set up, and, if you feel you fit in at DU, then you will fit into the Kosmunity. :-)

You can email me at my yahoo account if you want: tenehatexan@yahoo.com

I won't be around until this evening, but if you email me, I will answer you.

I am also pretty new to DU, but find it to be better than the other liberal communities on the internet.

I like Kos because you can get lots of feedback from people there. And it isn't restrictive of what you can discuss.

As for the skins, I don't do much of that. I am pretty handy at html, though. But DailyKos is pretty much fool proof, so a lot of HTML isn't needed.

Do you have an AIM account? If you do, you can email it to me at my email address, and we can talk real time.

Hope I have helped you at least a little bit. :-)